I come from Hong Kong, a coastal city of 263 islands, and now live in Naarm. To arrive in Mparntwe—for my residency at Watch This Space—was to arrive as far from the ocean as I have ever been. Far from what I have known as home, and from anything that resembles it.

Something unexpected unfolded here. Not longing, not nostalgia—but a kind of strange, quiet comfort, a space where memory loosened its grip, where I could learn to look differently. I watched the sky open into a field of stars. I followed a river that appears and disappears. I noticed birds in colours I could not name, the soft trails of grubs etched into dust, moths circling, disoriented by urban light. Butterflies returned to the red earth with broken wings. Buffel grass spread where it should not. Slowly, through conversations and listening, the land began to speak—not as scenery, but as history, held and carried by its people.

What Watch This Space offered was not just a site to produce work, but a shift in how I understand making itself. Removed from the habitual pull of diasporic narration, I found my practice coming back to something more elemental: to attention, to encounter, to the fragile meeting points between body and land.

Here, the dessert does not mirror the ocean I come from. It grounds, it clears. It asks for a different kind of honesty. In that asking, it reshapes my work until what emerges is no longer about where I am from, but about how I am here.